Oil From Algae?

[Keith Browning]

I found this link on Jimmy_Megginson's forum about producing oil/biodiesel from algae ---> http://www.oilgae.com/. Interesting reading.

[Jim Warman]

Many yuears ago, in one of my very brief hiatus' from this business, I managed a group of companies locally. The core business was an ESSO franchise bulk fuel/lube distributor. It was in the mid 80s and environmental considerations were the latest big news.

 

On the microbial level, there is a whole ecosystem in the bottom of a diesel tank... I'm unsure of the pecking order, so please bear with my personal view of what the chemists told me.

 

To a point, diesel fuel and water will emulsify (please look HERE to understand the term properly). This emulsification isn't good for the motor - but it ain't good for the microbes, either is what I was told...

 

However, if we trip on down to the INTERFACE... that point where it ain't quite fuel and it ain't quite water... this interface is teeming with microbial life.... These microbes do whatever it is microbes do (hey... I dropped out in grade 8 - I do what I can!!) until they expire. Without a retirement plan or decent burial coverage, they are left to drift down through the water that is mostly water where they may be consumed by yet another microbe.

 

These microbes also suffer from poor retirement planning and, when they expire, they drift to the bottom of the tank where yet another microbe is willing and able to become part of the "food chain".

 

Important to consider... my early and fleeting experience with these ideas involve fuel tanks capable of dispensing 32,000,000 liters in one year. I can't remember the exact capacity of our bulk storage tanks, but it wasn't uncommon for me to have more than 10 Super B train deliveries in a week during "drilling season".

 

They can use microbes to help with oil spills.... more food for thought.

 

Realizing that there are some microbes that seem to thrive in petroleum rich environments may lead one to imagine that some microbes might be a source of something we might be better off calling "pseudo-diesel" rather than bio-diesel. Purely conjecture... but I come from an era that few here might understand... and I have seen massive change in the world. If you can dream it, it just might happen.

[GregH]

I remember seeing something similar to this on television a while back. There was this series on Dicovery or The Science Channel, where these kids had a converted schoolbus that ran on waste vegetable oil and travelled around the country looking into alternative energy...

 

It was campy, and pretty lame, and I wondered at times about the sexual orientation of the main actors, and how their orientations probably changed after spending weeks in their schoolbus, but if you could see past that there was some interesting technology.

 

One of the topics was petroleum from algae. Essentially a ziploc bag of green goo, tossed onto a conveyor belt running around this field in the sun. After the prescribed time, the mix is centerfuged to separate the components, and there's yer oil.

 

It was a really lightweight description of the process in the show, but it got the basic points across.

 

Anyway, there were some other interesting ones too - generating electricity from falling water - a whopping big underground water tank buried at the top of a hill, and a series of perf-pipes feeding rainwater and dew into it.

 

Not really scalable stuff, I know. But at least it would get you thinking.

 

Speaking of growing oil, anyone read about using palm oil to fuel transportation? Recent estimates are interesting - by using palm oil in aircraft, Hawaii can produce enough fuel to send all the aircraft that land there back to where they came from - eliminating the need to barge over jet fuel.... I'll try to come up with a link...

[Brad Clayton]

I like the idea of harvesting energy from waves.